Dolls: The Hunt Review

A Reality Show You Can't Vote Yourself Off Of

Dolls: The Hunt drops up to four players into a warped, surreal world where contestants in an inescapable reality show are hunted through porcelain-doll-themed nightmares. It's the follow-up to an earlier "Dolls" project from solo-adjacent studio Fake Fox, and several reviewers who tested it before launch make a point of saying the developer's habit of actually listening to community feedback carried over from that first game. Landing in Early Access at $8.99, the sample so far is tiny but unanimous — ten reviews, all positive — with playtimes that skew surprisingly high for a fresh Early Access release, including one reviewer logging over 100 hours already.

Two Very Different Ways to Get Chased

The game splits its content into two modes that reviewers describe as feeling like entirely separate games sharing one art style. Hunt Mode is the co-op centerpiece, dropping a group into a map where hostile dolls actively stalk the players — one reviewer specifically warns that the dolls can hear your microphone, turning voice chat itself into a liability during a chase. Escape Mode, by contrast, is built for solo play or small groups and leans into exploration and light puzzle-solving at a slower pace, letting players who don't have a full squad available still get a complete experience. More than one reviewer calls this the smartest structural decision in the game, since it means the game doesn't live or die on always having three friends online.

The Prison Escape Map Is an Early Highlight

Among the handful of maps already in the build, the prison escape level draws specific, repeated praise as the toughest and most memorable of the set. Reviewers describe genuine tension running from the dolls through its corridors, and one reviewer who tested pre-launch calls it a highlight of the whole game. A separate running gag has formed around a literal button placed at the end of the woods level in Escape Mode — multiple reviewers reference it directly, with the consensus being that pressing it is absolutely worth the resulting jump scare rather than something to be avoided.

Combat Has Real Bones, But Needs Sharper Teeth

The combat system pairs a dash-and-roll dodge with a three-hit melee combo, and one detailed review that's been tracking the game since launch praises the movement feel specifically, calling the dash and roll satisfying on their own merits. That same review is also the sample's most constructive critic: it flags that the energy bar recharges too quickly to meaningfully limit dodge spam, which lets players avoid most enemy retaliation by simply hitting once and rolling away, and it notes that enemy stagger animations trigger inconsistently, sometimes rewarding an aggressive follow-up and sometimes getting overridden by the enemy attacking first. The same reviewer explicitly hopes the combat moves further toward souls-like weight and openings as development continues, treating the current state as a promising foundation rather than a finished system.

Presentation and Content Already Punch Above Early Access Norms

Visual presentation gets consistent praise across the sample — the dolls themselves are described as highly detailed, the world's dystopian, surreal atmosphere is called original and distinct, and the collectible skins earn specific compliments for how good they look. One reviewer who spent over 100 hours in the game sums up its core appeal bluntly: watching dolls blow apart into pieces is simply fun on a moment-to-moment level, a physics-driven payoff that shows up across multiple reviews as a reason players keep coming back. Achievements, unlockable skins tied to specific challenges, and small easter eggs scattered through the maps all get called out as evidence of a surprising amount of content for an Early Access price tag.

A Small Community and a Few Rough Edges

The most consistent critical note in the sample isn't about the game itself so much as its current population — one reviewer reports finding zero public Hunt Mode lobbies available when they went looking for a group, and suggests an official Discord server would help players find each other and give the developer a more direct feedback channel. On the interface side, reviewers ask for larger, more legible health bars and damage numbers, better lighting or a proper gamma option for a parkour section reported as too dark to see clearly even at maximum brightness settings, and clearer naming for the game's numbered emotes rather than generic "Emote 1" through "Emote 10" labels. None of these complaints are described as severe, but they're specific and consistent enough to flag as the areas most likely to matter for anyone jumping in during this early stage of development.

Reviewers Are Already Pitching the Roadmap

Perhaps the strongest signal of goodwill in the sample is how many reviewers spend as much time suggesting future features as critiquing the present build — a customizable emote wheel, sit-down and interaction animations for the lobby, a wave-survival mode, and a proper monster codex explaining each enemy all come up as specific, thought-out requests rather than vague wishlist items. That kind of detailed, invested feedback, paired with a developer reviewers already trust to listen based on the previous Dolls game, points to a community that expects this Early Access period to genuinely shape where the game ends up.

Verdict

Dolls: The Hunt arrives in Early Access with a clear identity already in place — a co-op doll-hunting nightmare with a genuinely different solo-friendly Escape Mode bolted on, backed by strong art direction and a developer reviewers trust to keep improving it. The combat's dodge-spam problem, the thin population of public lobbies, and a handful of interface rough edges are all real, but they read as the ordinary growing pains of an early build rather than fundamental flaws. For co-op horror fans willing to grow with a small developer's Early Access roadmap, this is a promising, unusually content-rich starting point.